Video: How to Leverage Data to Monetize OTT Content

Jarred Reeves, Director, OTT & International at Machinima, discusses the challenges of monetizing OTT content and the value of real-time data in pursuing effective monetization strategies in this excerpt from a panel at Streaming Media West.

Jarred Reeves: We're in the business of gaming, and kind of that geek and fandom culture, so a lot of the content that our creators are making are gameplay walkthroughs, Minecraft being the most popular. Anybody with kids knows Minecraft.

I'll use Comcast Watchable as an example. We launched on them when they launched their platform last September and we're seeing that, as kids are jumping on the platform, and parents are turning on that set-top box instead of Netflix to them, Minecraft pops to the top every single month for us.

But the challenge, I think, that we face most often is that a lot of these platforms that we're watching on always have data and reporting somehow at the bottom of their roadmaps, believe it or not. Working with YouTube we get real-time data, so we're constantly upgrading and changing the program as we see different things coming in. Whereas if you get data 45 days in arrears, it kind of makes it challenging to be as flexible as we're used to. But, I mean, data is really driving our content investment across all platforms.

What we're really trying to do is take our content and move it up the monetization funnel. You know, the audience is there for us. The audience isn't the problem, it's really the monetization. That means figuring out how to channel, in the United States alone, 25 million people to very specific content on very specific platforms so we could really achieve the highest ROI on the content that we're making.

And then at the same time, serving the audience to where they're consuming the content--which for Machinima and many other MCNs mainly is on YouTube, and now Facebook, and Snapchat is a growing environment for us. But really trying to understand that you can't just take one piece of content and put it everywhere and expect it to perform the same, or to have the same following. It takes a certain amount of promotion and understand of each individual platform, which is a challenge at Machinima. We started our Facebook initiative in January of this year, we had a million views a month before that and now we're up to 50 million views a month, so it's really about, for us, kind of just trying to focus, with all the millions of platforms that are popping up.

With the shift in consumer viewing patterns for premium TV content toward OTT, online, and mobile, how are major content providers meeting the challenges of monetization with reduced ad loads and different UX expectations?

The hottest driver off OTT growth, according to Amazon's Richard Au and Dailymotion's Anthony Layser, is customized, user-specific discovery algorithms, which they explain how to leverage in this clip from Streaming Media West 2016.